Ghost setup using Docker

For a long time, I was using WordPress for a basic website setup. I mainly did this since it was easy to set up and run with a LAMP stack (Apache/MySQL/PHP). This was the old way I did things, you know just what I taught myself over the years. LAMP was always a stable setup, and still is of course.

Over the past couple of years, I have started to dive deep into containerization. This started in my own environment with lots of Self-hosted goodies, more to come on this. So I figured, why not bring this to my web hosting?

I heard about Ghost on the self-hosted podcast. It took some time for me to actually take a look at this. Mainly since my day job is all about computing, I don't have as much time for my home lab as I used to. Since spinning up containers is a breeze, I spun up a local copy on my large Docker VM. For this I used Docker Compose since it has a MySQL database attached.

version: '3.1'

services:

  ghost:
    image: ghost:4-alpine
    restart: always
    ports:
      - 8080:2368
    environment:
      database__client: mysql
      database__connection__host: db
      database__connection__user: root
      database__connection__password: example
      database__connection__database: ghost
      url: http://localhost:8080

  db:
    image: mysql:8.0
    restart: always
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: example

I pulled this Docker compose from Dockerhub, it is just an example as you can see from the password field. However, it's a quick setup, and I was able to quickly get started with Ghost. My first impression were'nt great, maybe it was the colors. But once I played around I started to like it. The application has great customizations and even allows for "code injection", meaning you can input HTML, CSS, and I think Java into the header/footer files. The next major plus was everything could be written in markdown. This is a major plus since it makes editing content a breeze.

After some refinement and reading the documentation, I was able to edit the compose file. The above will only work as a test. You will lose all your configurations if you don't set up volumes for MySQL and Ghost. Below is my final compose file.

version: '3.1'

volumes:
   ghost:
   ghost-db:

services:

  ghost:
    image: ghost:latest
    restart: always
    ports:
      - 8080:2368
    volumes:
       - ghost:/var/lib/ghost/content
    environment:
      database__client: mysql
      database__connection__host: db
      database__connection__user: root
      database__connection__password: #Change This
      database__connection__database: ghost
      # this url value is just an example, and is likely wrong for your environment!
      url: http://127.0.0.1:8080

  db:
    image: mysql:8
    restart: always
    volumes:
       - ghost-db:/var/lib/mysql
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: #Change This

To get this running all we need to do is initialize with a docker compose command.

docker compose -f ghost.yaml up -d